The tone of Lummis’s relationship with Arizona was set the moment he first set foot in the territory in January of 1885 on his "tramp across the continent" from Cincinnati to Los Angeles. "It is painful to recall the day I … crossed the line into Arizona, for thenceforth the whole tramp was an experience one would not care to repeat," he recalled in his 1892 book about the trek.

He had taken more than a month to meander through New Mexico, having immediately fallen in love with the place. Now he was behind schedule and faced a three-week march along the railroad tracks across 600 miles of windswept midwinter plains and the Mojave Desert to reach Los Angeles. It didn’t help that he broke his arm shortly after he crossed into Arizona. He set the bone himself and trudged on in a daze through a "wet sullen landscape" in a cold, drenching rain -- the scene punctuated by "a ceaseless yell of coyotes and the occasional blur and roar of a passing train."

Of course, Lummis couldn’t hold a grudge for long against the state that is home to the Grand Canyon. "Language cannot touch that utmost wonder of creation," he declared. "There is but one thing to say: ‘There it is; go see it for yourself.’"

The red rocks of Sedona

The Grand Canyon

Oak Creek Canyon north of Sedona

Lummis and Arizonans

Lummis’s longest stay in Arizona was in the spring of 1886 when he spent a month at Fort Bowie, the headquarters for the U.S. Army forces who were trying to chase down Geronimo. His dispatches to the Los Angeles Times portrayed many of the denizens of the Arizona territory as corrupt and ruthless scoundrels who "would jump at the chance to signalize their bravery by shooting a captive squaw." They kept the Apaches stirred up to perpetuate a war that was bringing in so much army money, Lummis reported.

Lummis had another run-in with Arizonans in 1902 when the Indian rights group he founded, the Sequoya League, went after a heavy-handed U.S. Indian agent in Keams Canyon. An Arizona sheriff allied with the agent put out a warrant for Lummis’s arrest.

Those episodes aside, Lummis had many friends in Arizona, Sharlot Hall, for one. She arrived in Arizona by oxcart as a child traveling with her family on the Santa Fe Trail. Lummis was instrumental in launching her career as a poet and writer. He made her associate editor of his magazine, Out West, and published dozens of her stories and poems. She spent most of her life in Prescott, home today of the Sharlot Hall Museum.

Downtown Prescott

Sharlot Hall, Prescott poet 
and Lummis Pal
Photo courtesy of 
Sharlot Hall Museum, Prescott

Montezuma Well

Montezuma Castle

'See America First'

Montezuma Well and Montezuma Castle were among the wonders of the Southwest that Lummis featured in his travel classic, Some Strange Corners of Our Country, which was first published in 1891. The book was a tool in one of the many crusades that Lummis launched during his life – his crusade to persuade Americans to "See America First" (a slogan he claims he coined). The idea for such a campaign came to him on one of his visits to the rim of the Grand Canyon, where he was dismayed to find more Europeans than Americans gazing into "the greatest abyss on earth."

He regularly chided Americans about their lack of knowledge of their own country, as in this passage about Montezuma Castle, with its characteristic touch of hyperbole. The remains of the Sinagua Indian dwelling tucked into a recess half way up a cliff is "a much finer ruin than many that people rush abroad to see along the historic Rhine," he declared.

Peeples Valley south of Prescott